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Musings From The Professor's Desk

Dear Readers,

One of the best aspects of my career as a university professor has been the ability to live out, time and again over the years, the truth that teaching is the best form of learning. Teaching takes the “lecture to the wall” technique to an even higher degree. This technique of restating aloud, in your own words, what you have just read or learned is the first best test of whether you have understood something. It is all too easy to go through the motions of reading and assume that you have followed the train of thought or events and comprehended the message, but if you do not lecture to the wall, you may be deceiving yourself. Although this technique as such is most valuable, you get no feedback from the wall, so explaining things to others who can indicate whether they get it or not is an even more valuable way of testing your own grasp of a topic. Moreover, in the process you often see perspectives or get insights that you did not notice before.

As a college professor, I experienced this most often in my willingness to work as a generalist and from time to time teach introductory courses outside of my field, such as anthropology or political science. This required me to learn the material first, then turn right around and teach it, which was always pleasurable and provided me with my own lifelong learning process. However, teaching general subjects to young people getting a first foundation in learning is one thing; teaching one’s own passion to mature minds who already share an interest and have knowledge of their own in the area is quite another matter. The former experience only provided me with a wider range of knowledge; the latter experience changes the way I live my life from day to day.

Over the past year, since opening the Academy, I have been blessed to have the opportunity to get this latter experience on a regular basis. Leading the circles as I do, with the type of dynamic minds that we have and the questions that they ask, really leads me to reflect upon what we are reading and discussing and to understand and appreciate it in new ways myself. This is true not just in the “content” circles (Great Books, Sacred Books of the East, History of Religions), but in the linguistics ones (Path of the Polyglot and Language Learning Support Group), and in the languages themselves.

For instance, we opened a Sanskrit circle because students specifically requested it. Now, while Sanskrit is a language that I have studied a great deal at various stages in my life, it was not one that I was giving any stress to recently. Now all that has changed, I do an hour a day of it, and I cannot understand how this has not been one of the principal languages of my life all along. As I revise and present my manuscript for my lectures for the Path of the Polyglot, and most especially as I am challenged by the participants as we discuss it, I have time and again realized that I have somehow stopped a practice or an activity that I once found valuable, and so I have begun these again, which is always most fulfilling. More than anything else, I have long believed that reading literature aloud in foreign languages is the best way to relish it, and that is precisely what we do here.

In sum, I would like to thank the participants in the various circles from the bottom of my heart for providing me with the privilege of teaching you, for you in turn are providing me with the most satisfying learning experience of my career.

With best regards,
Alexander Arguelles

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Student Spotlight

Meet Shaun Dent

Former tradesmen turned English teacher. Now a reformed traveller, working as a communication coach, and pursuing his academic and scholarly interests wherever they lead.

Shaun ran as far away as possible from French at school, now rectifying that short-sighted mistake. A weekend in Amsterdam in his 20s sparked a fire for Dutch and the challenge of language learning. Fluent in Italian, now studying Latin, Greek and French.

“I stumbled upon Professor Argüelles’ YouTube video “A Polyglot's Daily Linguistic Workout”, whilst preparing material for my own students. I was looking for something to motivate and inspire them. Which it did. Though it had the greatest effect on me. From there I consumed all the Professor’s writings I could find. His ideas on the value of reading Great Books, the benefits of doing so in their original languages, and what an ideal education for training polyglots could look like, all spoke to me. It was as though they explained gaps in my knowledge I had been blind to.

Last year I began studying French following his methods. Having failed to learn several languages in the past, the aim was to push myself, to see if I could really learn a language on my own whilst not living in the country. Then I jumped at the chance to join the Great Books Of The West. We read Herodotus first, and that book has inspired me to learn Greek, and all I can about ancient civilisations.

I later joined Path Of The Polyglot and the Language Learning Support Group. Thanks to the support of my peers and the Professor’s lectures, I’ve gone from being incapable of maintaining daily language study, to someone successfully balancing 4 languages simultaneously. I hastily decided to join the Latin Guided Self-study course when it launched, and can’t recommend this style of education enough. You don’t get taught Latin by the professor. You get taught how you should learn a language, based on his decades of experience.

This has been the real benefit of the Academy for me, developing the habits of disciplined language and literature study. As you become more disciplined in one area of your life, it can’t help but spill over into every aspect of it. The Academy has been a great force of positive change for me.”

Additional student accounts can be found on the Academy website under Testimonials.

August Book Recommendation

This month I would like to recommend the volume we have just begun for Great Books of the West, namely the collected plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes. In his How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler says “Most plays are not worth reading … they were not meant to be read – they were meant to be acted. However, a few great plays … contain within them some of the deepest and richest insights men have ever expressed in words. Among these, Greek tragedy is probably the toughest nut to crack…” Indeed, I recall that when I first read these, as a freshman at Columbia in its Great Books “Lit Hum” core curriculum reading and discussion seminar, I found them utterly incomprehensible. I had no understanding of the psychology that motivated the characters to act as they did, so their behavior made no sense, and I could not sympathize or empathize with them, but rather found them odious and so reading the plays seemed like a terrible waste of time. This past week, we had our first discussion of Aeschylus, and though I feared that the participants might have the same experience I had had, I was very pleased to find that, on the contrary, they all enjoyed the readings to the extent that I think we may have had our liveliest discussion ever!

August Video Recommendation

How to Learn Vocabulary in Foreign Languages

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